NewPoetry

Sheila Peters

There are, I’ve been told, people dying.
And I am sitting up here
in this room, this bucket of light
riding at the business end
of some complicated piece of machinery.
Someone else handles the gears and levers
that keep me aloft, up here in the night
looking out:
………….the stars pop, the fat moon
………….rises above the canyon rim.
………….A slow satellite passes.

All this to light a parade of people,
bundles balanced on their heads,
babies strapped to patterned cloth
fluttering on thin bodies. Carts dragged
across broken ground. Soldiers –
big-booted, bare-footed –
finger triggers, draw knives from clever sheaths.
Their hands –
some dark, some pale –
their long arms, wide shoulders, strong backs
wield clubs and blades and rifles
to break apart the translucent sheath of tissue
that keeps us separate. To release the blood,
spill its good bright oxygen richness
back into the air we all suck deep
ten times a minute, the same air that feeds
each detonation driving the pistons
of this machine.

My dog looks at me sideways –
eyes sly as her tongue slips out the other side
of her mouth, bright pink against her grinning teeth –
and laps up the blood pooling in the tracks
ground into the grass by this machine.
It holds me in its bucket
way out into the night
and shows me things.